And for the intelligentsia...

Nope.
Tricky question.

Intelligentsia is a Russian loan word; how apt! But I didn't know "Bistro" was too. I am going to learn all these, so I can use them in conversation all the time to impress everyone.

Bandwagon

Steve and Reid and Matt have done it, and so has Rebecca. So here goes: here is a photo from way back when of Pluvialis, aged 12, before she'd ever killed anything with a hawk. She's feeling oh so grand in her snazzy stripy C&A sweater because she's been allowed to carry Frodo, the Hawk Conservancy's Tawny Eagle, between the display ground and his weathering ground. Can you see the 'They've let me hold the eagle! I'm accepted as a grown-up!' look in her eyes? Meeeep!

And here she is many years later. Oh dear me. This was a dark period in her life. No more stripy sweaters and display eagles. Oh no. Black shades, black gyr x peregrine, naval aviator's jacket, black heart, blood on her hands (duck, that is). Sheesh, what a psycho.


She's lightened up a bit, since then.

A Layman's Guide to the Atom

One of my very favourite books is Atomic Energy for All: A Layman's Guide to the Atom and its Uses, published in 1960.

"Nuclear fission has many by-products" says Chapman in the cover blurb. "Some are harmful, but the gravest of all is fear".

Brilliant!

Here are some more snippets of Chapman's inimitably avuncular and cheery style.

What has helium in common with neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon? All are notoriously independent, proud and indifferent to their surroundings.

If we could isolate a single helium atom, magnify it enormously and flatten it out on the page like a wild flower pressed in a book, it would look like this..

It is from this that [scientists] deduce that the bonding of atoms into molecules is due to the interplay of electrons with insufficient work to do in their own spheres—just as a man playing in the outfield in a slow cricket match might strike up an acquaintance with the onlookers.

Atoms of U235 may be thought of as quarrelsome people. While they are widely separated over the district, or, better still, the whole country, all is well. But put enough of them together in the same neighbourhood and trouble is inevitable.

The trouble with atomic energy is the bombs. How nice if nobody had any; if we could tap the atom for industrial and research projects, but couldn't use it as an explosive. ... Or would it?


And there are pictures, too! Click for larger versions...

It must be the weather

I've been reading material on imperial hunting culture in British India.

Oh this stuff is so much fun to read. All of it is fascinating. Some of it is highly dubious and some, frankly offensive, but most of the time it's just hilarious, and sometimes achieves greatness:

Unless you are a man, such as my old friend Wilson was, able to walk forty or fifty miles up and down without fatigue, it is all nonsense going pheasant shooting in the Himalayas...

tsk!

And the photographs — how many of you chaps out there have game-fished looking like this?

And my favourite:

But...but I don't understand:

how could it have come to pass? How is it that I was unaware of the existence of the daily Dinosaur Comic of Dinosaur Comics? No, I mean really, how? HOW?!!

Obscene

The person who said this, which I can't even read without the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end, is the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.

Run away

I am grumpy this morning, grump grump grump, because I must finally sit down and write a report for a publisher on a book manuscript so impossibly, scarily weird and bad that reading it is a physical difficulty. I've never experienced anything like this, ever. Not in my wildest dreams. But—well, there's a passage in Count Zero that keeps coming to mind. It's where Turner plugs a biosoft memory file compiled by a truly artificial intelligence into his head, and suffers the consequences:

It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlinear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input.

EXACTLY. That's so exactly what it's like, I could save time by just sending the publishers that paragraph. Ha ha. But seriously, I've delayed writing this report for about three weeks because the book scares me so much. It's like some weird 1950s behaviourist pluvialis-in-box conditioning experiment. It's so horrible to read I don't want to go back to it. Ever.

Realism

Rabbit toys made of real rabbit fur. Soooo creepy.

Why are we so strange?

Is the title of this marvellous post on Querencia today. The photos! The hair! The joy! I am waiting to be tagged, oh yes. I laughed out loud loudest of all at this, from Steve:

I am so weird I never thought about it—just followed my interests—until Betsy Huntington told me I was eccentric in my late twenties. I had always patterned myself after the great naturalist–adventurers from the Victorians to Will Beebe and Roy Chapman Andrews, and was puzzled that I couldn't get around the world as easily. Once after I mused on this she stared at me and said in her best patrician drawl; " Stephen—don't you understand that they were all richer than GAWD?"

Until that moment it had never occurred to me.

But who is Scott?

Morning coffee was made glorious by the three chaps having a meeting at the next table. I couldn't help it: a bit of stenography was irresistible. The frescato blender and the burr grinder intruded in places, and my tastes in espionage have never really been of the industrial kind, but oh, it was such fun to jot down some overheard fragments....

Now, this is a real priority, we need to get this finished now. Before any priority one stuff.

It's important that we can look at it—absolutely—if they do something and it's all finished—every two weeks, obviously.

Hmm.

six-weekly meetings — tell them about the project introduction — product rethink — Scott — that's specifically why I saw him last week.

So I mean the other thing is on their reports they should give a thought for example of people like Scott who are involved in conceptual — features —

To a certain degree they are, they don't have the detailed knowledge that we have because normally the typical stakeholder's project, we have to sell

they'll tell us nothing

yeah, what's he going to tell us — where's the bottle of scotch?

Ha ha.

I can't... the way it works...we have a list of features...

what our customers want..what their customers want...the retailers...that's down to the product. That's why the product spec.

But it can’t be underdeveloped

it's not

That’s all I got until my computer ran out of batteries. Perhaps if I was in industrial intelligence I’d think this conversation was gold dust. But in reality it was the verbal equivalent of an explanatory diagram drawn by business types meeting on the next table in a café a few years ago. I picked it up after they left. It went like this:





What does it mean?

Poet, Economist, Retail phenomenon

Well, the trip to Ikea was quite fun, it turned out, experienced as it was in a haze of noradrenalin. Ikea has always scared the life out of me. Particularly the showrooms, those vast, nerveless twilight-zone simulations of 21st century newlywed living. They really freak me out.

I am sure everyone in the world has been to Ikea, just as everyone in the world has read the Da Vinci Code, so I need not describe the arrows on the laminate floor and the sofa section and the lights section and the bed and wardrobes section, that last particularly terrifying by virtue of the 36 million combinations of wardrobe sections, parts and options you're given. "Subcreatures! Gozer the Gozerian, Gozer the Destructor...the Traveller has come. Choose and Perish!" etc etc.

I am ashamed of all this, because my Ikea tripmate C delights in the admittedly beautiful little faux-apartments and rooms around which the goods swim in halogen pools. C has the ability to stand in a display room and imagine it is a real one. This is not difficult, because they perfectly resemble real rooms, as long as you don’t look out of the door unto the showroom floor. She finds standing in these spaces calming. I don’t. Put me in a display room and I get metaphysical dread. I come over all E.M. Forster and run away. I have a despicable lack of retail bravado.

The ‘marketplace’ section is my refuge. Big shopping trolley: that’s how I calmed my nerves. Pushing one of these gives you a sense of direction, an assurance that there’s an exit you’re walking towards. I find myself thinking “Wow. How can this be so cheap?” Erk! The Ikea Mantra! It’s like a soviet short-wave radio broadcast; you can’t escape it. It gets into you head. Somewhere, Ikea scientists are ticking off my predictable responses to the Ikea Environment—somatic, psychological, reactive—one by one on a dedicated spreadsheet called Hvekkken or Sülkkavalla and laughing their heads off.

But! Swedish Marketplace! I become a hunter-gatherer and all is forgiven, Ikea. The following norlandish provisions were bought:

1. "Soft Arctic Cake" (how could I fail to buy something called this?)
2. Elk Sausage
3. Reindeer Salami
4. Elderflower Cordial
5. Pink sugar mushrooms
6. Gravadlax
7. Small hot sugar cars (?!)
8. Salmon sauce
9. Small hot sugar roadsigns (?)

I can report that the reindeer salami is despicably delicious. Reindeer is despicably delicious. I used to envy our Arctic field teams up on the Taimyr Peninsua—not the mosquitoes, but the diet of reindeer. I could eat reindeer until the cows come home. As it were.

Profligate!

Mine!
Mine too! bwaaa hahahaha
Ah, the simple joy of buying pictures you can't really afford. But I am not here to gloat. Nor to witter on about the genius of Eric Ennion. I am here to say: you also have the opportunity to be profligate! Many of these drawings, sketches and small paintings (all from the artists' estate) are still for sale. Here.

Another busy day has got in the way of me saying more about Ennion. Today, believe it or not, will culminate in taking housemate C on a trip to Ikea. I am steeling myself in readiness. Ikea is not my natural habitat. I am more than a little scared...